Exploring Science Teacher Questions’ Influence on the Students’ Talk Productivity: A Classroom Discourse Analysis Approach

Abstract

It is still less known how teachers organize classroom dialog to foster intellectual contributions to classroom talks. The current study developed a coding scheme to clarify science teacher questions and identify how different questions affect students’ talk productivity. The participants were 28 fifth-grade students and a science teacher who conducted argument-based implementations. The verbatim transcriptions were analyzed through a systematic observation approach. The teacher elaborated on the students’ background reasoning in a metacognitive learning setting. In addition, the teacher assigned the students as co-evaluators of the credibility of the presented ideas. The teacher invited the students to re-consider their ideas’ explanatory power by displaying discrepant questions. Moreover, the students had to propose justified claims once they were requested to support their propositions with ample and proper data. The teacher used his questions to guide the students to handle basic process skills and make inferences regarding natural phenomena under consideration. The legitimating, discrepant, and justified talk questions fostered the students’ talk productivity than the eliciting, metatalk, process skills, and inference questions. Recommendations are offered around the teacher noticing term regarding the relationship between questions asked in science classrooms and students’ talk productivity.

Examining the Type and Quality of Questions Asked by a Science Teacher

“…It can be said that studies addressing teacher questions and emphasizing the importance of these questions are limited in years of research on the teaching processes of science teachers in their classrooms. When the literature is examined, it has come to the fore that the studies on the quality of science teacher questions and which learning features are limited, comprise of only a few studies (Eshach et al, 2014;Hus & Kordigel Aberšek, 2011;Kayima & Jakobsen, 2020;Soysal & Soysal, 2022). Determining questions through classroom observations, which are an important component of teachers' current formative assessment practices, is very important for the accurate determination of the aspects that are disrupted in their teaching since the determination of the situation of science teachers about asking questions can make an important contribution to understanding their inadequacies in their interaction with their students.…”